Kailor: Hello, my loves! First note: Scarlet Peak is on hold for a while.
But here we are with this story to keep you fed! So strap in, loves. It's going to be a bumpy ride.
Chloe pauses in the alley between the bakery and the blacksmith. Although the darkness hides her well, she tugs her hood lower and her cloak tighter, scanning the market. As usual by this time of night, it's silent. With curfew only a few minutes away, the merchants are all tucked up in their homes. The stalls are barren. On the other side of them, the docks are the same: abandoned and still. All the lamps are doused, the ships just dark, swaying shadows on black water.
She presses her palm against the cool stone of the blacksmith's shop wall, leaning out as far as she dares. Down the road, walking away from her, are two soldiers. They move slowly, weapons put away. Their red coats flutter a little in the wind and they walk with their hands tucked deep in pockets lined by her father's money, no doubt. There isn't a soldier for days' ride that isn't under his thumb.
They reach the end of the port road and turn out of sight. Unwilling to wait any longer, Chloe darts across the cobblestones. When the soft tapping of her shoes on the road changes to dull thudding on the dock, she slows and bends, nearly crouching. She settles into a patch of shadow and turns back to the market, squinting at the clocktower, lit only by the crescent moon above. Nearly midnight.
As the minutes crawl by, her knees begin to ache, her pulse pounds in her ears to the beat of the clock's ticking hands. Finally, just as the hands meet at the top, she hears the singing.
It's a woman's voice, soft and shivery, floating in the dark spaces between the ships and the shore. The language is foreign and she shivers, fighting the urge to run. The echoing voice sounds almost surreal, coming from everywhere at once while drawing her farther down the dock. But it's here, like Lady Gail had said it would be, so she rises, grimacing at the tightness in her thighs and knees, and starts down the wooden path. The voice grows louder, but no less eerie. It slides over darkened decks and furled sails. She pauses occasionally, trying to pinpoint the exact source. The deck groans under her foot and she jumps.
Chloe glances back, searching the darkness for movement. There is none, but the feeling that she's being followed crawls up her spine, gripping at her ribs with startlingly cold fingers. Cursing her paranoia, she pushes on.
The creaking of ropes and rigging grows louder the farther she goes from the market. Wind whistles in empty crow's nests and slapping waves hit against hulls below her.
Something thumps and she spins, stumbling and staring hard into the dark. There's nothing. Pale from the cold, her hands shake as she tugs her cloak closer. She backs up a few steps, then turns, walking just a bit faster than before.
The clouds shift, letting a sliver of moonlight through. It lights the dock enough that she can make out the end and the dark bow of the last ship tethered there. The voice tremors down to her and, somehow, she knows that ship is where it leads. She glances back once more, her heart racing as her mind runs through the instructions Lady Gail had given her. She turns with the dock, moving alongside the ship. "Hello?" she calls softly, still searching the dark stretch of wood behind her. The moonlight is fading again, leaving the shadows to close back around her.
She looks up just as a figure leans over the railing. The face is in darkness, but she thinks a braid swings over their shoulder.
"We are severed by the sun."
The voice is soft, feminine. The singer, she realizes. And the familiar phrase nearly draws a sob of relief from her, but she bites it down and instead says, "And by darkness, are made one."
The woman pulls back and she hears a sharp scraping sound. Something clatters over the edge of the ship, dropping toward her. It misses her by a foot, smacking onto the dock before sliding off to hang between the ship and her. A rope ladder. She doesn't hesitate to grab hold, climbing as quickly as she can with her thick cloak and the small satchel she carries beneath it. Warm hands are waiting at the railing to help her clamber over. Once Chloe is steady on her feet, the woman grabs the ladder and pulls it back up, folding it into a hollow in the deck. She places a heavy board over the hole, hiding it from sight. Chloe waits patiently as the woman straightens, dusts her hands together, and lifts a small lantern, opening it.
She blinks in the sudden light. A sturdy chair sits beside the railing, surrounded by orange peels. The deck is cleaner than she'd expected, the wood shining in the lamplight, the ropes fresh and well-maintained. The woman is cleaner too, though Chloe takes a moment to stare at her clothes.
Her breeches are dark, her billowy shirt light, and over it she wears a vest of what Chloe recognizes is satin. It's purple with swirling designs embroidered throughout and Chloe thinks of the fabrics her mother always returned with from the Orient when she was little. Her bandanna is the same color and material, wrapped tightly around her head. The woman is nearly a head taller than her. And she is beautiful, dark hair braided down over her shoulder and perfect, tanned skin stretched over high cheekbones. "What business have you aboard the Belladonna?"
Throat suddenly a little tight, Chloe clears it politely and says, "I wish to speak with your captain. The Crow."
The Crow. An omen of death. Just saying it sends a shiver down her spine, not helped by the cold night wind that slips beneath her cloak to chase it. It's a name rarely spoken above a whisper in the town. The few times she was brave enough to venture into the tavern, she'd overheard stories of the Crow not actually being human at all, but a dark beast risen from the depths to tear apart Navy vessels and merchant ships. She knows the tales are foolish and that the Crow must be just a normal man—pirate or no. But she's heard the legend so many times now that she can't help but feel a little afraid as the woman before her nods and turns away, taking the light with her. She hurries to follow, stumbling a little on the bobbing deck.
It's warmer below deck and brighter. Lanterns sway every few feet down the hall, which stretches in both directions from where they stand, as well as forward. The woman turns right, glancing back only once to make sure she follows. They pass door after door. Some she thinks she hears murmuring voices behind. Others are slightly open, but dark inside. More halls and stairways split off every now and then and the woman leads her through turns and twists in the passages, never faltering. Chloe sticks close to her heels, having completely lost her sense of direction. It's far larger than she had imagined. She'd heard that pirates were paranoid and tended to construct their ships to confuse invaders, but she wonders if this one doesn't seek to confuse his own crew as well.
Finally, the woman stops at a door on the left. It doesn't look any different from the other doors they've passed, but the woman doesn't hesitate to push it open. "Wait in here. I'll go wake the Crow and our first mate."
Chloe suppresses another shiver and slips inside the dimly lit space. The door shuts behind her and she's left alone in a room that looks startlingly similar to her father's study. A single lantern hangs above a desk near the back of the room. The walls are covered in shelves, piled heavy with books. Their spines are hidden just beyond the lantern light so she can't identify any titles, but she can make out the lengths of thin rope strapped across each row, holding the books in place as the ship bobs back and forth.
She's just dropped her hood and taken a step closer to try and read the titles when a voice speaks behind her.
"What have we here?"
Chloe gasps, spinning around. She hadn't heard the door open again, but open it is, and a smaller woman stands at the threshold. The light from the hall and the lack of it from in the room puts her face in shadow and Chloe can only tell that she's a fairly tiny woman, slim waist, thin hips. Long, dark hair. And something silver glints in the top of her left ear.
"Do you not speak English?" the woman says, her voice lower than the one that had escorted Chloe here. Slower too, a slight drawl to her speech, like she can't be bothered to enunciate clearly. She suddenly says something in a language Chloe doesn't understand, tilting her head a little. Chloe catches the outline of a sharp jaw and forces her mouth open.
"No, I-I mean, yes. I speak English."
The woman is completely still, just her hair swaying with the ship, and Chloe realizes she must be waiting for her to answer the first question.
"I...wish to speak with the Crow. The other woman said she was waking him."
"She is." Smooth as silk, the woman slides fully into the room and swings the door shut with just a twist of her booted heel. Her voice is practically a whisper, but it seems to fill all of the darkest corners of the room. "But I wanted to speak with you first."
Once, when she was young, her father had come home with a small fox in a cage. She'd been enthralled with the small creature, its graceful little body and the way it could curl completely over itself to snap at its own tail. How its beautiful ears flicked back and forth when she spoke to it. Her father had his men build a large fenced in area on the back lawn and fill it with hedges pulled up from the forest and large, felled branches from the trees. He set the fox loose inside and she would watch it frolic and play from the balcony of her mother's rooms, giggling as it pounced about, chasing bugs.
But then her father had brought his finest hunting dog, Bo, inside the fence. And she watched as the fox froze, ears laying back when Bo spotted it. Neither of them had moved for the longest heartbeat of her life, until Bo snarled and the fox leapt into the hedges to escape.
It didn't.
And now, all these years later, Chloe thinks of that fox again and how it must have felt. Boxed in with something it had known was a predator upon first sight. Something that feels dangerous, without even having moved yet. Her skin crawls and she's suddenly intensely aware of the sparse few feet between them, of the woman's soft breaths in the silent room. Of her own much quicker ones. Because this predator isn't like the one she's fleeing. He is dangerous to her in ways she's witnessed and survived.
This woman scares her in a completely different way. Because she has no idea what she's capable of.
"Why are you here?" Her eyes are adjusting to the dim light and she thinks she can see the curve of a brow, but the woman stays back in the deepest shadows of the room and Chloe wonders if it's a purposeful move.
"To speak with the Crow."
"About?"
"Passage."
"Where?"
"My aunt's house in Spain."
The woman stops then and Chloe pulls her cloak more securely around her. A flimsy defense, but all she has as she stands in the pool of lamplight, speaking to shadows. "Why?" they whisper.
Chloe licks her dry lips. "My father is trying to marry me to a man I do not wish to wed."
"And why not?" Even phrased as a question, it's practically an order and Chloe nods, her blood whispering an instinctual command to obey, to keep the predator at bay.
"He is not a good man. In many ways." Half of her wants to pull up her sleeves, loosen her corset, reveal the handprints around her wrists, her elbows, her ribs. The dark, aching bruise that curls around her hip and spreads down her leg. The purple caps of her knees. The scraped skin that stretches across her thighs. The other half never wants anyone to see them again. Lady Gail said she would heal soon enough, if she got away. Just scars, one day.
The woman stirs suddenly, one step forward, and Chloe does her best not to flinch. The lamp sways, light ebbs and flows across her face, and Chloe gets her first real look at the woman's features.
Pale skin, thin lips, dark eyes that track across Chloe's face, studying her right back. Her ears are filled with silver hoops, leading up to a thick metal bar through the top of the left. Chloe tries not to stare. It's rather difficult, because if the first woman she met was beautiful, this one is breathtaking.
Her shirt is barely laced in the front and Chloe feels her cheeks heat up as the light slides over the swell of a breast and shadows pool in bare collarbones. Her hands are tucked behind her back and Chloe suddenly wonders if she hides a weapon.
With a start, she realizes this woman is more dangerous than she had first thought. One look at her face and Chloe had forgotten to be afraid.
Like it only needed to be remembered, the fear rushes back full-strength and she sidesteps, circling with the woman, step for step, until they've switched places. Under the swaying lamp, the woman's earrings glint sharply and her teeth flash when she speaks. "So you seek refuge among pirates."
"It was the best option." Her father won't take her back into his home, insisting that if she were just better to her soon-to-be husband, the issues would end. Her mother is gone. Her few friends refuse to believe someone as perfect and well-respected as Lord Thomas could be so cruel. Most, if not all, of the city's guards are employed by her father. So when Lady Gail had slipped Chloe a poultice and a whisper at dinner, she had listened. She had followed it to the Belladonna. To this room and this woman that unsettles her so.
And yet, Chloe can't bring herself to stop staring at her.
The woman settles back against the desk, her hands moving around to her front. Empty hands, Chloe notes. "And you just wish to hop aboard? With the most bloodthirsty pirate crew on the seas?" She tilts her head again, her dark gaze appraising. "The Crow isn't known for charity. Hired work might interest him, however…"
And Chloe realizes they've reached the part of the meeting she was most dreading. But this woman isn't the Crow and the plan she'd prepared suddenly feels foolish and highly embarrassing. "I-I have no coin."
For the first time, the woman's lips curl up, but it's more of a sneer than anything. "Then what did you intend to pay with, girl?"
Chloe tightens the grip on her cloak, feeling her face flush as the woman's gaze darts immediately to the slight movement, then flickers back up. For what feels like the first time since she stepped into the light, the woman blinks.
Her sneer drops away and the impassive face from before slips right back into place. She stands and moves, following the circle they'd made before back toward the door, eyes never leaving Chloe's.
She retreats back to the desk. It's only when the woman turns away to yank the door open that, without that piercing gaze on her, Chloe is able to take a deep breath. The woman gives a short whistle.
The first woman, the one in the purple vest, appears in the doorway almost immediately. There's a whispered conversation that Chloe strains to hear but fails. Then the woman in the purple vest is in the room, taking Chloe by the arm firmly but with soft hands, and steering her into the hall. For a moment, the terrifying realization hits her that she may have just silently made the offer she'd planned to make to get passage and it had been accepted. Her heart races and she wonders, not for the first time, if she's made a mistake. If she's run from one hunting dog only to land in the jaws of another. Offering her body to a pirate to be free of her abusive fiance had sounded like a brave sacrifice before, when she was alone in Thomas' home, waiting for the maids to retire for the night and tending her wounds secretly. But now, as she's marched down a dim hall toward what she can only assume is the captain's quarters, the idea squeezes around her lungs so hard that she struggles to take in a breath. She turns to the woman holding her arm. "Are we— Am I going to speak with the Crow now?"
The woman glances at her and Chloe—ridiculously, considering the circumstances—notes that her eyes are green. "You just did."